The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [1]
The dinner that night honored a distinguished visitor to our campus, the Israeli composer Izaak Andropov. As it happened, he’d taken a fever, and didn’t attend.
I was here to make a new acquaintance, the head of a University fiefdom called the Forum for Interpretive Scholarship. The Forum had money. They had Associate-level jobs. They had offices, salaries, everything. Best of all they had no duties, no classes. Or so Ted MacKey had promised me, letting out this information in a casual way, as if I might not be looking around for another slot someplace the year after next. This happened all the time, that is, people I hardly knew often suggested, one way or another, that they’d like to help me. I was the object of much goodwill, in fact, sometimes because the man I’d worked for in Washington was disliked, and I’d quit him; or, conversely, because he was liked, and I’d worked for him. In any case, here was a chance to stretch out my vacation another academic year or two. Nothing ever happened at the Forum beyond an occasional presentation by one of the scholars, most of them emeriti from Big Ten universities and such, who just dragged out the lectures they’d been dragging out this way since the days when Ted MacKey’s big beige globe had known what it was talking about.
I don’t think any of the guests knew each other more than casually, but we didn’t have to struggle much for things to say, as Ted MacKey had arranged a short concert for us. A young woman played the guitar and another the cello, after which Ted’s grade-school son played the lute with astonishing self-possession, wearing pajamas and a robe and fuzzy slippers, and concentrating, plainly, not on his fingers but on the truth of his music.
I was seated next to Dr. J. J. Stein, the one who pulled the strings at the Forum for Interpretive Scholarship. Some kind of Scotch broth was dealt out. Even if I was aware I’d enjoyed too many of them, I didn’t mind these dinners, particularly at the University. I like being around people who like being where they are. In the scholarly world, the world of the mind, much more than in the world of politics, it’s common to meet people who’ve truly earned their comfort, at least in a sense, having labored through and left behind the parts of childhood so unpleasant for scholars, brains, intellectuals. And here they are, respected and safe at last, while the others slug it out in the marketplace. Dr. J. J. Stein was the person I might have imagined if I’d been trying to visualize this meeting in advance, a happy, bearded, balding scholar. And he went on to make an explanation for me of a kind I might have expected, too—incredibly earnest thinkers always have to explain the names they choose for their projects, because the names mean absolutely nothing when you hear them—as to why “Forum” was just the right word, why only “Interpretive” conveyed the right sense, why, when you’d finished considering all the words in the English language, “Scholarship” had to be the one.
I wasn’t sure how deliberate a job of selling had been set for me in Dr. J.J.’s mind, but it happened I had an idea I wanted to elaborate, one requiring research assistants and more than one office, the kind of enterprise that might rope in all sorts of scholars and result in an anthology of essays all on a theme, and this vision I produced for him while he interrupted with enthusiastic questions, and the cellist, just on the other side of him, got attractively tipsy. In the midst of this it occurred to me aloud that Dr. J.J. might write my anthology’s introduction